The Internationalization of American Venture Capital and its Implications for Sustainable Development

Serving as a platform that will enable a successful academic career, this ESRC project aims to consolidate my PhD and subsequent research on the political economy of venture capital (VC) and its techno-utopian promises of artificial intelligence (AI) for sustainable development. VC is a type of financing for start-ups that seek to develop new technologies and business models with significant growth potential. The project will further enhance my research profile by consolidating my novel critical political economy approach and understanding of the internationalization and global hierarchies of VC. The project has three main objectives:

Developing academic publications:
One paper on VC in sub-Saharan Africa to be submitted to a leading journal;
Securing a book contract and submitting as book manuscript based on my PhD thesis with a renowned university press.
Developing a programme of engagement and impact-related activities:
One Op-ed in The Conversation to disseminate findings to broader audience;
One-day stakeholder workshop with the Alan Turing Institute (ATI);
White paper of stakeholder workshop to be presented at policy-oriented conference.
Building international academic networks and developing proposal for follow-on funding grants:
Two academic conferences;
One-day academic workshop targeted at early career researchers (ECRs);
Two-week research visit at the WZB Berlin;
Research proposal to secure follow-on grants from ESRC or European Research Council (ERC).
As part of the ESRC project, I will develop a chapter of my PhD into an article on the emergence of VC in sub-Saharan Africa taking Rwanda as a case (target journal: Review of International Political Economy). This ESRC project provides an opportunity to transform my qualitative and quantitative research into the first research monograph on VC which traces if and how the international expansion of VC has reinforced American technological hegemony, and its implications for sustainable development. It does so by examining how VC markets outside of the US became subordinated to American financial and tech capital (e.g., the UK and Rwanda, albeit in different ways), while China became largely independent of the US due to its growing domestic financial and tech sectors through which the Chinese government seeks to secure technological autonomy in AI. The book manuscript will be developed as part of the project and submitted to a renowned university press at the end of the Fellowship (target publisher: MIT Press).

The ESRC project also includes a programme of impact-related activities to ensure that the research is taken up by key stakeholders. First, I will disseminate the findings via one Op-ed in The Conversation to a broader audience. Second, I will draw on stakeholder networks established through my previous work at ATI to organize a one-day workshop "Democratizing AI Tech Innovation" with non-academic stakeholders including policy makers to co-produce a white paper identifying policy levers towards democratizing the technological innovation process. The white paper will be presented at the policy-oriented The World Transformed conference in 2025.

Lastly, the ESRC project aims to help me build international academic networks and develop a proposal for follow-on funding grants. For this, I will present at the Finance & Society and SASE 2025 conferences, and organize a one-day ECR workshop at City to explore trends in research on VC. I will also conduct a two-week research visit at the WZB Berlin to develop ideas for research collaboration, and develop a proposal to secure follow-on grants from ESRC or ERC.